Sellers.json

When it comes to managing fraud, there are four steps CTV publishers should take to remove bad actors from the supply chain.

The era of fragmented, adversarial ad tech is winding down. A new paradigm is emerging defined by AI-first, end-to-end platforms and collaboration among buyers and sellers.

Many well-intentioned advertising standards efforts gather digital dust thanks to industry politics and competing interests. Here’s how the industry can stop sabotaging its own progress.

PubMatic CEO Rajeev Goel dishes on sell-side curation, data fees, how the business model differs from buy-side curation and how publishers can control pricing for curated deals.

MFA sites simply don’t belong on ad exchanges. And the industry already has the tools it needs to eliminate MFA from the supply chain.

The proposal to transition ads.txt into ads.json comes with some major problems, and its benefits can be largely achieved in a far simpler way – by reformatting existing ads.txt files.

While Publisher Collective didn’t see a positive or negative revenue impact from decluttering its clients’ ads.txt, it learned a lot about which of its partners were valuable and the amount of waste hidden within unnecessary line items.

Armed with Ads.txt and Sellers.json files, Nandini Jammi, co-founder of Check My Ads Institute, spends her days exposing how money flows through the twisted pipes of the programmatic supply chain. Her goal? To defund disinformation, toxic content and hate online.

The current model for ads.txt isn’t helping the industry understand how publishers are working with sellers and resellers, writes Rotem Shaul, co-CEO of Primis.

You can’t have supply path optimization (SPO) without supply chain transparency. The ads.txt version 1.1 update released in April added OWNERDOMAIN and MANAGERDOMAIN variables that allow publishers to label a site’s parent company and the intermediary that is selling a site’s ad inventory. The IAB Tech Lab’s Jill Wittkopp spoke to AdExchanger about how these supply chain transparency tools relate to the industry’s pursuit of SPO.

Connected TV may be the media industry’s shiniest new toy, but it’s not squeaky clean – it’s rife with ad fraud, and high CPMs only make the channel a better target for con artists. Several industry execs discussed why the industry’s best shot is to increase transparency as much as possible across the bid stream at IAB Tech Lab’s Transcend summit.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Long Live Linear On Friday, Innovid reported its second quarterly earnings since the company went public in December and its first since closing its acquisition of TV measurement provider TVSquared earlier this year. Innovid’s revenue grew 44% YoY to $25.9 million. Excluding TVSquared, Innovid […]

The IAB designed the sellers.json specification to follow the money – but the spec has its own limitations that require hygiene practices and general maintenance for accuracy. What’s more, just because an entry exists on sellers.json does not mean inventory is available to buyers, writes Eric Bozinny, senior director of marketplace quality at PubMatic.

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Lior Shvo, Managing Director at Sellers.guide. It’s not rocket science: Advertisers want to reach the right audience, at the right time, at the right price. Here’s the thing, though: Doing that is waaaay too […]

“On TV & Video” is a column exploring opportunities and challenges in advanced TV and video. The words we use matter. Last month, for example, the Media Rating Council recategorized the term “over-the-top” as “connected TV,” which is what most people in the industry mean when they refer to streaming. The distinction is important, because it helps buyers […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. SPAC Attack Mobile gaming monetization and ad tech provider IronSource began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), with the goal of raising $2 billion in capital at an $11 billion valuation. The IPO comes […]

The idea behind Ads.txt was simple: publishers create a public list containing the names of all the partners they work with, and buyers check that list before they buy. But even the simplest of ideas can get complicated when they go from paper to reality. Some publishers just said “yes” to every request to add […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. New Specifications The IAB Tech Lab is rolling out new specs, this time for the buy-side, around transparency and brand safety: big topics of conversation these days. IAB has released two new technology standards — buyers.json and DemandChain Object — that are open for […]

After a disappointing debut in June, Google released an updated version of its sellers.json file Thursday afternoon. Sellers.json is a mechanism developed by the IAB Tech Lab that buyers can use to verify which exchanges and SSPs are authorized to sell a publisher’s inventory. Google’s expanded file now includes information for 1.2 million publishers, and […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by John Clyman, vice president of engineering, marketplace quality and security, at Magnite. It’s time to provide sellers with transparency into the buy side of the industry, just as buyers have rightfully demanded transparency from […]

At long last, Google released its sellers.json file. And the world was 5% grateful, in line with the level of completeness of Google’s file. This week on The Big Story, the AdExchanger team welcomes Jounce Media founder Chris Kane to talk about what’s missing in Google’s seller.json file. And senior editor Sarah Sluis, who spoke […]

Google released a beta version of its sellers.json file last week, just before the Q2 deadline it promised at the beginning of this year. Sellers.json is a transparency tool to help buyers distinguish between direct sellers versus intermediaries and resellers. Yet, only 5% of Google’s sellers.json files are complete, according to data from programmatic consultancy […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written for the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Adam Schenkel, senior vice president of global commercial development at GumGum. Even if you haven’t followed the 2019 launch of the sellers.json spec, the thinking behind it should sound like a positive move forward. […]

The Trade Desk and Google are locking horns on pending industry specifications designed to bring transparency to programmatic buying. Why? The Trade Desk, rather than Google, is the one throwing its weight around for a change. As one of the originators of the Open RTB SupplyChain object spec, The Trade Desk has been gunning to […]

First there was Ads.txt, then there was App-ads.txt. Now there are Sellers.json and OpenRTB SupplyChain Object Specifications. The two new specs, released for public comment by the IAB Tech Lab on Thursday, are both meant to help advertisers get a better understanding of whether the inventory they’re buying is legit and where it’s coming from. […]